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Dec 28, 2016, 08:00am

Setting The Standard For Excellent Customer Service: Four Technologies To Employ

Your relationship with customers doesn’t end after they’ve purchased your product or service. In fact, that’s just the beginning of a long-term relationship. What if a customer has a question or complaint and can’t get in touch with you or your team? Do you think they’ll refer you to others or make another purchase in the future?

As a digital marketing consultant, a good portion of my client experiences deal with customer retention as well as customer acquisition – and the bedrock of customer acquisition is customer service. In the 21st century, customers are smarter than ever. They know the difference between good and bad customer service. They expect omnichannel experiences where they can connect with your business via social media, instant chat, email and phone. They want to feel appreciated and have a low tolerance for a lengthy response time. And people will sometimes choose customer service over price and product.

Customer experience isn’t just an additional perk – it’s non-negotiable. That’s when a customer service help desk becomes one of your business's most important assists. The following is an overview of some of the strategies and tools I've used to help meet these client goals, and have had success using:

Help Desks: What They Are (And Why Your Business Needs One)

A help desk is simply a service that provides information and support to customers. Most enterprise-level companies have several help desks to handle various needs. For instance, one desk may take care of tech support, while another responds to shipping inquiries. Other organizations outsource their help desks so they always have someone on call to respond to a customer. For small businesses, however, there may not be the resources or budget available to outsource or have multiple help desks. In this case, you would turn to easy-to-use and affordable help desk software to manage your customer service needs.

Help desks also enable your business to resolve any ongoing issues, work more efficiently and can save both you and your customers time. For example, if you were using a spreadsheet to track customer issues and resolutions, then you’d have to manually enter that information. This method also doesn’t give you the chance to prioritize tickets, while a help desk can do a better job of streamlining and categorizing issues by level of importance.

AI Chatbots And Facebook Messenger Bots

Chatbots are computer programs that conduct conversations through audio or text. These programs are designed to simulate how humans speak to each other, which is why they’ve become major components of customer service or information acquisition. In other words, chatbots can be thought of as AI-powered “representatives” that enable businesses to talk to their customers in a personalized and efficient manner.

Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg pitched chatbots within Facebook Messenger as new apps. And to the delight of users, such as Marketing Land’s Danny Sullivan, the bots worked flawlessly. In fact, Sullivan was able to send Zuckerberg flowers using a Messenger bot in about five minutes.

In the B2C world, Facebook Messenger can be used to manage complaints or questions by integrating chatbots, such as Botsify and ManyChat, with your Facebook account. Both tools can be set up in a matter of minutes and can then handle a variety of tasks, like greeting new subscribers, directing them to additional content such as YouTube videos or blog posts, scheduling content, as well as automatically responding to inquiries from your customers.

Instead of overwhelming a team member with emails, direct messages or phone calls, chatbots can answer most of your customers’ questions or resolve any issues. This makes the process both instant and interactive. A number of companies I consult for have used some of the Facebook Messenger AI tools and have seen immediate results in both retention and new sales.

Password Recovery

Password recovery isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s expensive. According to Gartner, password resets accounted for 20 to 50% of calls to help desks. Furthermore, it estimated that each call to a help desk to help with password recovery costs $70.

In one case study conducted by identity management firm Avatier, password resets cost an organization a staggering $46,500 – or three times as much as the password management software. As password recovery evolves from emails and "mother's maiden names" to biometric factors such as fingerprints and facial recognition, this topic is worth taking notice of.

We’ve found that with implementing automated password recovery features it helps to free up help desk team members to focus on more bottom of funnel customer service and customer retention needs, which at the end of the day help to grow revenue. Password recovery is also beneficial for large internal teams, as the constant requests for new passwords or account login information can also lead to draining internal development team times.

There will always be instances when a customer needs an actual response. Obviously, responding to a flurry of emails throughout the day can be time-consuming. And what happens when customers are emailing you after business hours? Your inbox could be flooded every morning when you open it.

With email ticketing software, you can organize all of your incoming emails, categorize them by topic and assign them to the right team members. You can also prioritize them and receive notifications on the email’s status. Some tools, such as HappyFox, provide metrics like response time and time spent on tickets so that you can continuously improve the process.

Other tools like Freshdesk allow you to share your business hours with your customers when they send you an email. This notifies them that you’re out of the office and will resolve the matter during normal business hours.

As customer service continues to be the golden standard for choosing a business to work with, consider how you can enhance these elements in your own company so you can retain your current customer base -- and attract new ones -- in today's age of smart consumers.